The present invention relates generally to a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) system, and more particularly to a Web-based CTI system suited to configuring a call center and a help desk for performing customer window services such as selling commercial articles consulting with customers by utilizing WWW (World Wide Web).
The CTI system is capable of configuring the call center and the help desk for performing the customer window services such as selling the commercial articles and consulting with the customers by a technology of integrating a computer (data service) with a telephone (voice service).
In the Web-based CTI system that configures the call center etc in linkage with a Web server, the customer (who might be herein called a user), if there arises a necessity of speaking to an in-charge person at the call center who has special knowledge about a browsing content when browsing a Web page, has hitherto dialed (originated a call) an inquiree phone number displayed on a screen of a customer terminal through the Web browser and had a dialog with the in-charge person.
According to this customer-oriented method, however, the in-charge person is not recognizable of what content the inquiry made by the customer has unless the in-charge person speaks directly to the customer, and hence it is difficult to perform the customer window services quickly and exactly.
Further, in a Web-based CTI system disclosed in Japanese Patent Laying-open Publication No.11-346266, as shown in FIG. 1, when issuing an inquiry request (interaction request) by clicking an interaction request button embedded in a Web page from on a personal computer PC serving as a user terminal utilized by the user, the Web server displays a form for prompting the user to input a phone number of a user telephone terminal TEL on the screen of the user personal computer terminal PC.
When the user inputs the phone number of the user telephone terminal TEL from the user personal computer terminal PC (processing step 1), the Web server indicates, based on a user browsing history of the Web pages, a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) to call an in-charge person telephone terminal TEL used by the in-charge person having the knowledge that meets a demand of the user and to make a request for establishing a connection for a voice communication with the inputted phone number of the user via LAN (Local Area Network) and a CTI server (processing steps 2, 3).
The web server, upon a completion of the connection between the user telephone terminal TEL and the in-charge person telephone terminal TEL, displays the content of the Web page accessed by the user on the in-charge person personal computer terminal PC (processing steps 4, 5)
This scheme enables the in-charge person to deal with the user's inquiry content while confirming it in this Web-based CTI system.
According to this Web-based CTI system, however, the user invariably needs to engage in both of the voice communications and data communications at the same time through the user telephone terminal TEL and the user personal computer terminal PC in order to interact with the terminals of the in-charge person. In addition, when making the inquiry request (interaction request), it is indispensable to connect the user personal computer terminal PC to the Internet network.
Further, there is a case where a call to the user telephone terminal TEL is delayed due to busy lines of the PBX and of the in-charge person telephone terminal TEL. In this case, the call from the PBX might arrive at the user telephone terminal TEL irrespective of convenience on the user side.
Moreover, when the user makes a re-inquiry, a problem is that the Web server might misrecognize the inquiry content unless the user personal computer terminal PC is temporarily connected to the Internet network and the same access history as before is left.